The encirclement campaign against the Hunan-Hubei-Jiangxi Soviet was a military campaign launched by the

Kuomintang The Kuomintang (KMT), also referred to as the Guomindang (GMD), the Nationalist Party of China (NPC) or the Chinese Nationalist Party (CNP), is a major political party in the Republic of China, initially on the Chinese mainland and in Tai ...

Nationalist Government against the

communist Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a s ...

Soviet force in the Hunan-Hubei-Jiangxi. It was responded to with the Communists' Counter-encirclement campaign at the Hunan-Hubei-Jiangxi Soviet (), also called their Counter-encirclement campaign at the Hunan-Hubei-Jiangxi Revolutionary Base (). The local

red army The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, after ...

successfully defended this soviet republic against the government attacks from December 1930 through to May 1931. The communist 16th Army stationed at the Hunan-Hubei-Jiangxi Soviet launched a preemptive strike against the Nationalist forces and annihilated an entire Nationalist regiment in Tongcheng (通城), Hubei in December - just before the Nationalists could begin the first attack of the campaign. The Nationalists had to withdraw temporarily to regroup. Reinforcement troops from other regions came to the Soviet area to avenge the defeat at Tongcheng, leaving these other regions vulnerable to Communist attacks. Pouncing on the opportunity, the forces of the Hunan-Jiangxi Soviet decided to help their comrades in the Hunan-Hubei-Jiangxi Soviet by striking the government in two fronts, in the west and in the southeast of

Hunan Hunan (, ; ) is a landlocked province of the People's Republic of China, part of the South Central China region. Located in the middle reaches of the Yangtze watershed, it borders the province-level divisions of Hubei to the north, Jiangxi to ...

. Both Communist offensives in Hunan were successful. In addition to obtaining more land, weaponry, money and supplies, the Hunan-Jiangxi Soviet force also linked up with the Red 7th Army at the province's border with

Guangdong Guangdong (, ), alternatively romanized as Canton or Kwangtung, is a coastal province in South China on the north shore of the South China Sea. The capital of the province is Guangzhou. With a population of 126.01 million (as of 2020) ...

. The Nationalists were forced to redeploy their troops to face these new, more urgent threats; as a result the planned offensives against the Hunan-Hubei-Jiangxi Soviet. However, the Red 16th Army launched another round of assaults on the retreating Nationalist troops, annihilating eleven companies. After this victory, the 16th Army was joined by the Independent 3rd Division; together they succeeded in annihilating two more Nationalist regiments. The encirclement campaign against the Hunan-Hubei-Jiangxi Soviet was a failure. The Nationalists decided to discontinue the effort and concentrate their energy and resources on other

encirclement campaigns Encirclement campaigns (), officially called in Chinese Communist historiography as the Agrarian Revolutionary War were the campaigns launched by forces of the Chinese Nationalist Government against forces of the Chinese Communist Party during the ...

against major communist bases - Soviet Republics of much larger size - reasoning that as the larger bases were eliminated the smaller ones would not last long. As a result of the government retreat, the Hunan-Hubei-Jiangxi Soviet declared victory and continued to expand and consolidate their Soviet territory.

See also